Our journey- from 8 week old pup, to agility dog, school dog, and trickster. Training thoughts, tips and lots of problem solving, photography and general musings on owning a silly and serious paradoxical Aussie Shepherd.

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tunnel mad

As part of our foundation training, I’ve gotten out my el-cheapo $37 tunnel, set it up straight, and have been working on drive and speed with Lu, then throwing in a little cik/cap at the ends.She certainly runs through and considering this is the 2nd session we’ve done it, I can already see her driving to the tunnel more. The first session she’d do it once, wrap, and then run alongside the tunnel. I also did a couple of wrap & chase around the bollard but she wasn’t really into those today. I don’t yet have a lot of drive into a wrap from a standstill so I need to work on that I suppose. All questions I can pose once the Foundations course starts in April. In the meantime I’m getting extra practise in, which is great.

I think she’s going to be a great little dog to run – she seems to really enjoy the game, mostly. It’s been so hot here, and even this morning when we were filming the video it was already creeping up to 27 degrees, hot and humid. I make sure she has a couple of swims as this seems to renew her energy but she was still pretty lackluster compared to normal – bring back the cool weather and my fast, driven, energetic dog! At least if she’ll run in this heat, she’ll run in the cool.I think I’ll keep working with the straight tunnel for a while, and using it to really get her racing to, and looking for the cik/cap or the Go! at the end… then I might start curving it and see if I get the same drive forward into the tunnel as I’ve been getting.

I also want to work on, if you do a trick your reward is play/a toy, to really solidify that idea so she knows when we play out here, that that’s the reward. Also going to keep working on collar resistance- ST said in a reply to a comment I left on her blog that she just needs to resist, not necessarily pull forward. Problem is sometimes she’ll just stand there and look at the toy bouncing around, and if I pull back, she goes backwards. In the video you’ll see she’s much more interested, even getting lifted up. Hey, if that’s what she wants to do, we can do that.